If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically the story of a high school girl that gets whisked away to a confusing, dangerous and splendid China-analogue world that runs parallel to ours. She has a great destiny there, and the series follows her and others in various tales of growing up and adventure. 5 story arcs in all, the first and third (which focus on Yoko) are the best IMO: Quite stirring and epic.

I totally agree Andy! I loved this series, it was very moving, humane storytelling, depicting it’s character with no ‘super powers’, but actually fighting hard to survive with their own power and slowly gaining the power to take on what they have to.
I love the fact that the one person in it that tries to do the normal short cuts to stardom and power, fails epically.
I was so bummed when they stopped the series and I don’t think the studio ever completed the full, planned story.
I’ll have to consider buying this.

BTW, it’s sad the manji list is closing. I’ve been on that list since about ’98 or ’99 and we had some really good times there, but at the same time, I agree that the list has slowly lost it’s momentum, sadly and life goes on.
But between you and me, thanks for making it all those years ago. It was my favorite mailing-list for years and years and really made me look forward to logging in to my email to see if anyone had continued with the discussions we had.

Heya: Thanks for the comments! Yeah, between this, Fruits Basket and Ghost in the Shell (TV Series) you’ve got some of the best anime ever produced.

Re stopping: Turns out the author had a breakdown around that time, but the thing is that Yohko’s story had already ended. The author wrote a few more tales (about other rulers, and the story behind Taiki returning), but never went back to Yohko: Her story was decisively over. So on that front, while we might have gotten another season’s worth of episodes, none of them would have returned to Yohko’s story.

I agree re the manji list: I think I might keep it around for another month or two: I want to streamline my life a bit and get rid of stuff that’s just “dead weight” (and was hoping someone else would step up to take it over), but will give it another month or two to rethink…